For we which now behold these present days,Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise. This Pow’rful Rhyme EternalTennyson is famously to have declared Shakespeare 'greater in his sonnets than in his plays'. While the reader who might not soar as easily along the paths described by these Sonnets would find the comparison absurd to a degree, he/she would also have to admit that they understand the sentiment behind Tennyson’s blasphemy. Some of the sonnets are so well-crafted and consists of such unexpected imagery that they can leave one breathless at their majesty and imagination. Indeed, some of them are eloquent and eternal invocations of love at par with the best love poetry - just as his romances and tragedies that outrage conventions are the best in their genres!Even when he departed from most conventional expectations of poetry, Shakespeare was still able to leave his imprint on the very sonnet form itself. That should tell us how important these sonnets really are to literature. The form is now called ‘Shakespearean Sonnets’, and to do that centuries past the invention of the sonnets as a form is also an achievement that defies imagination. The Chatter of the CriticsNow we come to the depressing aspect: critical discussion on these, some of the best love poetry in the language, unfortunately centers more on historical speculation than on philosophical or aesthetic appreciation. Most of the introductions and critical commentary that accompany the sonnets focus on a biographical excavatory project, mining the sonnets for information, leaving behind tired mounts in their wake. Scholarship have been tragically been too sidetracked on this issue - away from the heart of poetry to its scholarly peripheries where readers might not want to accompany them.I wish some of these elaborate commentaries and footnotes that accompany almost every word of these sonnets were focussed instead on how the poems should be interpreted personally by the reader! Imagine if all poems were disassociated from the reader and read purely from a historical perspective of the author’s love-life or forensically on figuring out who it was addressed to - poetry would lose much of its universality!The problem is that we know so little biographic detail of Shakespeare and the Sonnets provide a tantalizing prospect to scholars. The question ‘when, and to whom was this written?’ is one which the poems repeatedly invite their readers to pose, and which they quite deliberately fail to answer. Of course he may not even have wanted his sonnets to be printed; there was, after all, an interval of approximately fifteen years between composition and publication, which makes the sonnet’s poet an unreliable narrator at best - we have no clue what the sonnets were intended for. And speculations/recreations of the ‘Drama of the Sonnets’ have shown almost as much inventiveness as we might expect in Shakespeare himself!Were they select poems sent to a single lover? Are they a collection of poems sent to many lovers, subject changing with each sonnet? Were they compositions made to amuse his friends or visitors, to impress them with his mastery? Were they lonely exercises of genius, indulged on to pass the time of the depressing Plague years? We really do not know. And knowing nothing, we still prefer to stumble about and tarnish the beauty of the poetry by wild surmises!That is tragic.As I said, the sonnets are tantalizing and they keep teasing the reader to make meaning out of them. At times they seem to build up a body of recurrent structures and preoccupations, and even a narrative of sorts, even shaping itself around possibly real events. And then it seems not to. A story converges from the lyrics, and then it vanishes. Instead, the reader should accept that the sonnets are so heavily patterned that almost any form could be seen in it - they are like the clouds, you only need to have enough enthusiasm and imagination to mould them to yourselves.Through all this however, and throughout, the ‘voices’ of the Sonnets appear in all their intricacy and dramatic power, resisting any simple reading. Shakespeare begins his sonnets by introducing four of his most important themes - immortality, time, procreation, and selfishness and then plays them off against each other:Sonnets of abject praise generate undertones of irony and criticism; Sonnets of abject depression generate undertones of hope and eternity; Sonnets of worldly criticism generate undertones of the exalted nature of poetry; Sonnets singing boasts about the power of poetry generate undertones of fear of mortality - the variations are endless and exhilarating. Exit The CaveThere is an introductory essay called ‘The Cave and The Sun’ in the Dover-Wilson edition of the Sonnets, of which I read only the introduction since I wanted to stick to my Arden edition which had better and more detailed footnotes (with very useful headnotes accompanying each sonnet and sonnet sequence - highly recommended). I found the metaphor employed and the advice given by Wilson to the raiders to be very relevant to my own reading experience. I want to discuss it a bit here, even though Wilson went on to disappoint me by not sticking to his own prescriptions on how the sonnets should be read and critiqued.Sir Walter Raleigh, who wrote the most human short life of William Shakespeare that we possess, began his section on the Sonnets as follows:'There are many footprints around the cave of this mystery, none of them pointing in the outward direction. No one has ever attempted a solution of the problem without leaving a book behind him; and the shrine of Shakespeare is thickly hung with these votive offerings, all withered and dusty.'Wilson adopts this metaphor and elaborates: Raleigh’s cave of mystery calls another to mind, Plato's cave of illusion, in which the human race sit chained with their backs to the sun without, and are condemned to accept the passing shadows on the wall before them for the truth—the real truth being only revealed to the few who are able to break their bonds and turn to face the light of day. Absorbed in our own attempts to solve the biographical puzzles that the individual sonnets offer us, we remain blind to the sun that casts these shadows but gives meaning to the whole.Begin by seeing that meaning and recognizing the whole as the greatest love-poem in the language, and the mystery of the detail becomes so unimportant as to fade away.That this is the right approach to an understanding, apparently so obvious and so natural, is surely beyond contest? At least to me it is. The Philosophy Vs The BiographyComing back to the sonnets themselves, one of the continuous experiences that enthrall the reader is to see how the sonnets keeps defying expectations and conventions. For example, neither the exhortation to love and ‘settle down’, the love for the young man, nor the passion for the 'dark woman' are subjects an ambitious poet would be likely to choose as the most suitable to display the genius of his verse.They instead form testimony to Shakespeare’s overriding powers of imagination.Peter Ackroyd, in his biography of Shakespeare, speculates that Shakespeare experimented and stretched the sonnet form to its breaking point - perhaps because he was bored of poetry, which came too easy to him.When we consider the repetition of themes and the easy show-offiness of how Shakespeare uses the Sonnets to tell the same things again and again, but always with consummate expertise and ease, it is hard to dismiss the idea.This might be reflected in the fact that so many of the Sonnets are overly megalomaniacal about the power of his verse, boasting of the defeat of time and the acquisition/granting of immortality.But even as these exalt us, even while we may be in awe at the overwhelming force of Shakespeare’s imagination, we would also be melancholy at the theme of relentless failure expressed in the poems, over and over, dealing with self-deception and betrayal; with the inadequacy of the mind, or the imagination, or poetry, to have any effect, even on the poet’s own feelings.This is how Shakespeare continually inverts the themes and explores them from multiple angles. When he praises the ennobling qualities of love in one Sonnet, he might make it about love's insecurities and dark aspects later, either in the same sonnet by employing the structural ‘turn’ or in a linked sonnet later on in the sequence.All this might make the reader feel out of sorts and uneasy. It is as if the conversation jumped from topic to topic in a broken-backed fashion. At times affectionate and intimate, at times abject and distant; but nothing clicks tight, no overall theme emerges. The poet of the Sonnets veers back and forth from the dream of omnipotence to the dread of mortality and impending loss, continuously in flux.Even the conclusion of this is almost wistful, a testimony to the ultimate powerlessness of the art that has been so hyperbolically praised, but at the same time leaving it hanging in mid-air, since we do not really know if these 'concluding' sonnets are really the conclusion, or if they were ordered right, or if Shakespeare intended to contrast the theme of the 'concluding' couple of sonnets by another soaring portrayal of Cupid reasserting himself. Again, we can only speculate. Reading the Sonnets is a particularly rewarding (and time consuming) exercise due to these delightful perversities of history and of the poet’s pen.Thus the reader would conclude the reading of the Sonnets with a strong sense that the emotions expressed in them refuses to fit into pigeon-holes that we/critics may have constructed for them.Individually most of the sonnets are creatures of infinite beauty but also bewildering due to their contrasting colors, and when we read the whole sequence as one, we might experience them differently. As one of the critics say, from its total plot, however ambiguous, however particular, there emerges something not indeed common or general like the love expressed in many individual sonnets, but yet, in a higher way, universal. While this is indeed true, we again lack the tools or the certainty to convert the individual sonnets into a ‘plot’ - we might try to understand a ‘philosophy’ of love and life from these meditations, but to hunt for a plot among them can only take away from the pleasure and the true experience of it.To me at least, the conclusion was that to relentlessly attribute autobiographical aims to the sonnets is to not give due credit to the imaginative genius of Shakespeare and impute that he was incapable of inventing such realistic emotions with his poetic person than he was able to achieve with his dramatic one. Why credit only the dramatic author to be capable of this imaginative creativity and not the poet? I think it is only desperation that forces this on us.We should accept that the author-character that emerges from the sonnets is not created for our convenience. It is not necessarily William Shakespeare, the man; it is William Shakespeare, the poet. What is your substance, whereof are you made,That millions of strange shadows on you tend?Since everyone hath every one, one shade,And you, but one, can every shadow lend.
I’ve been wondering for a while how to approach this review. I had thought that it might be interesting to do a close reading of a single sonnet and leave it at that. What I’ve decided is to write a quick review on this edition of The Sonnets, mostly chatting about the stuff this book gives to help a reader read them, and then, over the next weeks and months, add ‘comments’ which will be reviews of some of my ‘favourite’ sonnets. I’m quite looking forward to doing this – so we’ll have to see how things work out.I’ve three editions of The Sonnets – two of which are Penguin versions and then this Cambridge text. This is by far the best. The introduction runs for over twenty pages and gives as good a telling of the various important ‘stories’ of The Sonnets as I’ve read. It is not really all that remarkable that we know so little about these sonnets. They were written a long time ago and they were written to keep certain things ‘secret’ – and as such they have succeeded wonderfully. We don’t know who they were written for – neither the beautiful young man who is the main subject of the vast majority of the sonnets, nor the Dark Lady who is the subject of only sonnets 127 to 154.It is virtually compulsory, when writing about The Sonnets to mention sonnet 20 – well, not the whole sonnet, but just the lines:“Till Nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,And by addition thee of me defeated,”This is invariably quoted as proof positive that our Will was no poof. The sonnets to this young man are quite remarkable and it is hard to know what to make of them. They start with a sting of sonnets calling on the handsome young man to hurry up and have children, as he is so incredibly beautiful that for him to deny the world a copy of his beauty would be simply too cruel to contemplate. There is argument after argument about this in the first few sonnets– but I kept thinking of GB Shaw and that line he is supposed to have said to some actress who suggested they should have children together as with her looks and his brains the child would conquer the world. To which Shaw is supposed to have replied,“What if the child has my looks and your brains?”Which is the point – Shakespeare even says that the beautiful youth is the image of the youth’s mother at one point. So, his having a son is, quite literally, no guarantee that he will be leaving the world a copy of his beauty.The youth comes across as a bit of a pain, to be honest. The other amusing thing is that Shakespeare spends so much time telling the youth that he (Shakespeare) is making him immortal by writing these sonnets – which ends up being more or less true, except no one knows who the youth was. There is the dedication, of course, which is to a Mr W. H. – but that seems to cause as many difficulties as it solves, as most of the people the sonnets could be about don’t have those initials and some people have decided to see them as being for William Himself… Anyway, the dedication is to the “Onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets” and given that some of them, at least, are written to a woman, that does seem to make the WH solution – even if there was one – a bit awkward.I think I like the Dark Lady sonnets best – there is something much more carnal about them that gives them bite. There is no question what Shakespeare’s desires are towards this woman where his desires towards the young man are always harder to tell. These poems have a confronting honesty about them, particularly the ones that look at the nature of lust and how it over-powers our reason. These poems resonate to the core of my being.The big theme across most of the sonnets is time – how it slips away from you when you least expect it and how cruel our loss of youth, our loss of beauty and our loss of vitality is in all its inevitability. These poems provide us with a cold stare into the unblinking eye of the human condition. The limits of reason when confronted by lust in sonnet 129, “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame” or much the same in 146 and 147, “Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth” are not exactly the sorts of themes you might expect to find from your standard collection of ‘love’ sonnets. 129, in particular, is a devastating poem – but we will get to that eventually. So, as I said – this is not really a book that can be done in a single review or read in a single reading, so I’m not even going to try. Updates to follow…
What do You think about Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997)?
In the sonnets, the man of all ages becomes the man of an age – a very particular, very stylized age. The best sonneteer? Perhaps so. But it was a form that was already going out of style by the time his sonnets were published.Shakespeare is his typical playful and irreverent self in the best of the sonnets. He remains a master of the metaphor, and a refined, nuanced thinker beyond compare. But the sonnets are not my thing. The great voice that stormed at the universe in Lear, that explored the mad corners of the mind in Macbeth, that stared into the nihilistic abyss in Hamlet: Where is this poet in the sonnets? He’s rarely to be glimpsed. Instead, he’s advising a young man to marry. He’s doting upon a young boy’s good looks. He’s affronted at every slight. He’s insecure about his age. He’s pouting because his mistress is unfaithful. In a different time, Shakespeare would have been a different poet – and perhaps not a playwright at all. We are the product of our age, and few can rise above the fashionable limits of our time and place. What other Shakespeares might have existed had they lived in a different time? What of Shakespeare had he only written sonnets?
—Keith
Manny wrote: "Robert wrote: "The Sonnets, Abridg'd:Snooze."Avast, thou gorbellied clapper-clawed barnacle, thou loggerheaded flap-mouthed mumble-news!"This is a quote from Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter, isn't it? Where'd you find a copy?
—Manny
I was going to comment "I like it when books do stuff to me" but as I was typing it up I realized that, in no way, it would come out right.So I'll settle for: read it girls. It was goooood.
—Kim
